From http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com:

• Novel: A work of 40,000 words or more.
• Novella: A work of at least 17,500 words but under 40,000 words.
• Novelette: A work of at least 7,500 words but under 17,500 words.
• Short story: A work of under 7,500 words.

I would add flash stories to this list as anything under 1,000 words although a lot of places define it as under 500.

Though it greives me to say this, I think my natural inclination is to write novelette-length stories. Stories are accordion-like though, meaning most decent stories can be expanded or contracted to varying lengths. The main question, however, seems to be what the “right” length for a story might be, at least for a specific market. John Kessel’s short stories impress me because they’re very condensed and he says a lot without writing thousands upon thousands of words. Likewise, I couldn’t believe that Jeff Ford’s story “Creation” is only 4800 words. I would have guessed it was at least twice that long because it has definite weight to it, as does many of Kessel’s.

On the other side of the equation is Andy Duncan who said at Clarion, “It’s hard to kick a dog around in under 3000 words.” My favorite stories of his lean to the long side. “The Chief Designer” is a hefty 18K words, and “The Pottawatamie Giant” weighs in at 8K. Jeff Ford’s other stuff I really like is in the 8-12K region as well, and Eric Schaller’s excellent “The Five Cigars of Abu Ali,” one of the best stories I’ve read in a long while, is just over 11K. These are the kinds of layered, significant stories I want to write.

The hard part? Keeping a slush reader interested for that long. It’s not too hard to keep someone’s attention for a thousand words, which only equates to a few pages. It becomes much harder around two thousand words to keep someone interested and if the manuscript has a physical weight to it–meaning a stack of pages–the reader damn well better be motivated to see how the story comes out. Until you’re an established writer you will not get the benefit of the doubt, and even established writers aren’t allowed to blather on at length about unimportant things.

Most of my pre-Clarion stories are bloated by do-nothing attributions, junk like “he fiddled with his collar” or “she shifted her weight from foot to foot.” It’s amazing how this can push what should be a 4-5K word story into the 7-8K range. However, the four longer stories I have on deck are mostly existential musings in uncommon settings: a 19th century Montana ranch, a 19th century Minnesota farm, very early 20th century rural Manitoba, and late 21st century southern California. In short, none of these are “gimmie” locales. They require a lot of details because these precise location in space/time are essential to the story. So that’s a bunch of words just to establish the scenery and the scenery’s not even the point of the story. Each story deals with the somewhat large topics of love, myth, truth, and identity.

I think they’ll all naturally fall into the 8-10K range. But man, that’s gonna be a lot of work. Being that long, the story will be judged that much more critically and therefore must be better.

I’m finding I stay fresher if I switch between writing/editing long stuff and short stuff and there’s a definite feeling of accomplishment just mailing something out. This means less stuff goes out in the short term but, hopefully, it also means quality over quantity.